Forty years after The Exorcist scared the wits out of cinema audiences around the world, the Roman Catholic Church is training up a new generation of priests to meet a growing demand for exorcisms.

Dioceses across Italy, as well as in countries such as Spain, are increasing the number of priests schooled in administering the rite of exorcism, fabled to rid people of possession by the Devil.

The rise in demonic cases is a result of more people dabbling in practices such as black magic, paganism, Satanic rites and Ouija boards, often exploring the dark arts with the help of information readily found on the internet, the Church said.

The increase in the number of priests being trained to tackle the phenomenon is also an effort by the Church to sideline unauthorised, self-proclaimed exorcists, and its tacit recognition that belief in Satan, once regarded by Catholic progressives as an embarrassment, is still very much alive.

The trend comes four decades after the 1973 release of The Exorcist, the American horror film based on the demonic possession of a 12-year-old girl and attempts to exorcise her by two priests.

The diocese of Milan recently nominated seven new exorcists, the bishop of Naples appointed three new ones a couple of years ago and the Catholic Church in Sardinia sent three priests for exorcism training in Rome, amid concern that the Mediterranean island, particularly its mountainous, tradition-bound interior, is a hotbed of occultism.

In Spain, Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, the archbishop of Madrid, chose eight priests to undergo special training in May to confront what he described as “an unprecedented rise” in cases of “demonic possession”. The Church in Spain was coming across many cases that “go beyond the competence of psychologists” and they were occurring with “a striking frequency”, the archbishop said.

“Diabolical possessions are on the increase as a result of people subscribing to occultism,” said Fr Francesco Bamonte, the president of the Italy-based International Association for Exorcists. “The few exorcists that we have in the dioceses are often not able to handle the enormous number of requests for help,” he told La Repubblica last month…

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T. M. Luhrmann wrote When God Talks Back: Understanding The American Evangelical Relationship With God. She’s a professor at Stanford. Neuroanthropologist.

some excerpts I took out of the book,

“Grace began to feel like a conduit, as if the Holy Spirit would flow through her to do God’s will. She said that she had become open in the way Paul, in his letter to the Romans, says that you are supposed to be open, to allow the spirit to move through you to act on behalf of God. She would feel the Holy Spirit, physically, tingling in her fingers. She felt like she was offering herself as a sacrifice, and the structure that she thought of as who she was had broken down and she was flooded by new intensity. She found that she became much more emotional, much more in touch with what she felt and what the feelings meant to her, that they mattered to her in a way they’d never done before. She began to get deeply emotionally involved with her prayers. She found herself weeping when she prayed. She wept with sadness or even happiness, weeping sometimes as if the emotion were bigger than she was, as if it were out of control. ”

“In October, there was another conference. During the evening prayer sessions, someone had a “prophetic word” for the pastor that he should be doing more work with spiritual deliverance – the code word for the process of diagnosing demonic possession and then delivering the host person of the demon’s presence. They decided that they should pray again for Sarah. The man who joined them was more direct and authoritative than anyone who had prayed for Sarah before, naming and commanding and shouting at the demons that inhabited her. Afterward she still felt awful, and now she felt hopeless. She knew that none of the prayers had worked and that she still had demons. The pastor remembers that she cried out in anger: “I’m stuck with these demons. What do I do now?” She left the church. Within weeks, she was hospitalized for major depression. Over the next six months, Sarah went in and out of the hospital. She had two suicide attempts, one of them serious. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She tried a series of antidepressants, none of which seemed to work. Eventually she agreed to electroshock therapy, and slowly over the course of many months, the bleakness lifted. Had the demonic exorcisms made things worse? Sarah’s family thought so. In fact, they laid the illness at the door of her faith. “They blame the depression on being born again. Here I’d hoped to be a good testimony and a good witness to them, and it’s sort of worked the other way. When I told them that I was thinking of going back, they were horrified that I would go back to the place I was ruined.” Her new Christian therapist was appalled at the prayer she had been receiving at the church. The therapist wasn’t charismatic and didn’t believe that Christians could be demonized or, for that matter, that people could really speak in tongues.”

“People in their jeans. Hippies. I think, This is sort of neat. And then this guy gets up and starts talking. I can see that he believes something. He really believes something, and then – like he’s orgasmically on fire. And I’m thinking, Ooh, this isn’t following the rules. You know, we’re not sitting in the pews. But it’s not wild. It’s not threatening. It’s fun. He gave a sermon, but it was more like a talk, because he didn’t stand in the pulpit, he wandered around. He talked about making manifest the “gift that is within thee.” And I thought, That sounds pretty good, and – and then he started talking about love and knowing the love of God and so forth, and I’m sitting there and I’m looking at him like, You mean you’re supposed to go to a church to love and be loved? That’s novel! You really didn’t hear that in church. You know, in church you heard about sin and debt and going through the routine – actually, you didn’t hear anything. It was like dry sex, you know, it just didn’t work. And that night, in that room, this guy was just on fire. You knew he had a passion, you knew he loved, you knew he was offering something different. His words were alive.
He looked at me sort of right in the eye, and he said, “Would you like to be whole?” And I said, “Whole, oh, that sounds really good.” Love, whole, gift within you, you know? I said, “All that sounds really, really good.” He said, “Can I pray for you?” By this point, I’ve lost everybody in the room. I have now become so clued in to this man and what’s going on between us, and feeling a little excited, but a little bit awkward. And it was like – I just lost awareness. And now all of a sudden, all of these hands are on me, I don’t know where they came from. But they’re not just his hands, but they’re a bunch of hands. And then I hear people singing and talking in tongues. And that’s when I go, Oh my God, this is spooky. And I clam up. It was too much. But then I sort of stood up and turned around, and that’s when I saw the world as it is, the world as I now know it, and the world as it might be, should be, could be.”

Anarchy Pony

Well I’ll be a demon monkey’s uncle.

Daniel Gill

My first comment explains everything about how charismatic Christians become daemonically possessed. My second comment explains alchemy depicted in a Japanese anime. Alchemical transformation begins from offering your excrement, your former self, to be transmuted anew into gold through the philosopher’s stone, which is the dark pit in the core of your being which expands and turns you into a raving lunatic.

JoiquimCouteau

Reminds me of babylon and mesopotamia in the 1st century BC. The collapse of theocracies always results in demons, whether the gods formerly inhabited idols or television sets.

Daniel Gill

I study spirit possession illness particularly within the context of Vietnam and S.Korea . The psychotic mania as a result of the initiation is very real. The offering up of one’s soul to their Spiritual Mother is a serious commitment – literally, their life belongs to her. Korean dramas that depict shape shifters, and sorcery through seances are common. You only have to begin researching these things to see it. You only need to initiate to experience it.

I highly, highly recommend watching Mortal Kombat, and really pay attention. As well as watch The Moon That Embraces The Sun, and The Master’s Sun, which are two critically acclaimed Korean dramas.

S.Korea and Vietnam are the two among the most gnostic countries on the planet, for sheer number of people engaged with charismatic Christianity and alchemy syncretized with esoteric Daoism and such

This is not too much reading, and is a spectacular start into a new dark aeon

Daniel Gill

Those of you in University or otherwise have access to interlibrary loans, do what I said and take out those books. They’re all available to you. You can loan those out and read them, for free, you don’t have to buy them, and I want you folks to get on a higher level, stand on the soldiers of giants, and learn about the seriousness with regards to spirit communion in a truly syncretic transnational context.